Annotated 3-5
Since it’s really long and explains our early ideas as well as I could now, I’m just going to dive right into the description of this group that I gave Erica back in late 2009-early 2010. Phil was better than me at the worldbuilding overall, but I’m pretty sure this one was me, doing my best to match his approach.
There are six parents and one young daughter present. Yes, I know that adding the five adventurers makes that a cast of twelve– we’ll do our best to minimize the strain there.
Erica, you asked earlier in the series’ development about how much skin-color-mixing there was in the human population of Gastonia. The characters shown here are part of the answer, representing the noble families of Pardo, Iwitani and Miyamoto. Only Pardo is a European-esque name (Spanish, actually), the other two are Japanese. The city does have aristocratic families with non-white roots, few in number but great in power, whose wealth ultimately stems from long-established trade routes in Arkerrra.
I’m a bit at a loss for what to call this Japanese-like race, since Arkerra has no Japan or Asia as such, and most other terms are considered insulting. (How is it that “white” and “black” are okay, but “yellow” isn’t? It’s not like ANY of the three are an accurate description of the skin color.) Let’s go with “Oriental.”
Since there are few Orientals in this region, their status makes them an attractive match, and Arkerran society tends to focus its racism on non-humans, intermarriage between Orientals and whites is fairly common. His Grace Iwatani is half-white, His Grace Miyamoto full Oriental. His Grace Pardo, Her Grace Iwatani and Her Grace Miyamoto are all white. Her Grace Pardo is black, a marriage arranged on one of His Grace’s business trips, but despite being somewhat out of place she carries herself as an aristocrat should. Naturally, the Miyamoto daughter is half-Oriental. The point of this giant melting pot is probably obvious: Arkerran society is well-advanced when it comes to equality between the skin colors, at least at the high status levels, and yet deficient when it comes to relations with dwarves, gnomes and elves, etc., even when they’re actively seeking HELP from same.
Each aristo family has a set of colors which they wear on almost all occasions. I’d suggest black and gold for Iwatani, red and blue for Miyamoto, and purple and gold for Pardo.
For all that, there is one feature which unites all the adults: they are all fairly plump, having enjoyed their share and more of the good things in life. Best will mention this later in some difficult-to-rewrite dialogue, so I’d like to keep that detail if nothing else.
Some of these ideas did not survive the transition between artists: we didn’t really see enough of Pardo, Miyamoto, or Iwatani to establish their “theme colors” in these early chapters, and Phil and I honestly forgot all about those when the characters became important again. But the skin-color diversity is something I’m glad we established early.
Knowing the characters as we do, now, I think it’s probably a good thing that Byron, and not Frigg was talking to the Iwatanis. I can’t imagine her managing not to ask ‘are you SURE you actually want the kids back’ when the game was described.
On the other hand, knowing the characters as we do, now, having her ask that and His Grace actually declining would probably have been a good thing. For him, anyway. Not sure if His Grace could have screwed things up worse than His Brattiness.
I’m not so sure about that last bit. I think Iwatani Senior would probably have acted sanely enough to retain so much support among the Gastonian population that he couldn’t have been removed from power (much less killed) without causing a revolt. OTOH Taro made it quite clear to everyone that he was just a crazy kid who didn’t care at all about the lives of the people under his rule, which kinda helped humans to accept an alliance with the other races as a better option.
Sometimes you have to destroy the world to save it.
supervillaining intensifies
It’s funny to me how the aristocrats’ “benign racism” just slides off Best like water off a duck. Unlike Syr he’s not at all annoyed and even seems to consider it acceptable. Maybe Best considers himself to be beyond race, a special status given credence by Pardo’s effort to avoid offending the Epic Hero.
I don’t know — I think Best’s reply here is quite bardic in its ambiguity. He doesn’t say no offense taken — “I’m sure none was intended” leaves it pretty open how he’s taking it, and following with “our races have a long way to go” is… failing to absolve them of responsibility.
I remember I *almost* liked Best for a bit because of this line.
I always thought it was a nice touch that Gastonian society was devoid of racism or ethnocentrism because their bigotry was aimed at the non-humans. Perhaps that could be the cure to our own divisive society. We need to find life on other planets and soon.
It reminds me a lot of the Discworld, where they make a point out of how quickly humans got bored of racism when they could be prejudiced towards Dwarfs, Trolls, Goblins etc. instead.
“Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.” Pterry
Those poor Woodelves!
It’s about as plausible as the idea that racism isn’t a thing because everyone’s busy being homophobic.
Different kinds of racism intersect, they don’t overwrite one another. Real life example: my people (non-Black south Asians) leverage antiblackness a *huge* amount to get a leg up. This gains us conditional acceptance and a ton of legal, financial/class, and social benefits, so long as we refrain from challenging the setup. So rather than finding solidarity and challenging racism in general, we too often play along and help enforce it.
Sucks extra much for Black South Asians.
The overall plot of the comic shows this really well, IMO — Syr’Nj’s arc shows beautifully why the “model minority” thing is BS. She keeps trying so hard to get wood elves accepted by humans, and refusing solidarity with some other nonhumans to do so, and just gets used.
This little bit of uneven diversity… is actually pretty cringesome (in the larger fantasy/sf context, because it’s the same pattern that gets repeated over and over), because it means we see diversity in the antagonists and nasty side characters but not so much the sympathetic humans. Who are almost all white.
are.
Man, I hate the hell out of roaches. Can’t we just hate that while we wait, together?
So this is the only time we see Mrs Pardo and Mrs Miyamoto. I actually thought Mrs Pardo was a male, un-named extra. Oops.
And sorry, T, but as Avenue Q taught us: “Calling me olientar – offensive to me.” ;)
Also, the second rule of the burlap sack is obviously “Don’t talk about the burlap sack.”
T, about things to call East Asians — East Asian would be the best one. Or if you mean East and South East Asians, say that. Yes, it’s a bit clunky. But it should be when you’re talking about a quarter+ of the world’s population, because that’s getting into massive generalizations.
Speaking as a South Asian, “Asian” to mean “East Asian” is a bit of a problem, but you know what, if the rest are too long go ahead and use it, it’s about 9432875098745 times better than “oriental”. Also, “yellow”, YIKES. At least “Asian” doesn’t punch us in the gut even if it does overgeneralize.
A starting place for why “yellow” is horrendous (aside from the thing where nobody is yellow ffs unless they have jaundice): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril
Harder to find a starting place for why “Black” *is* ok; it was reclaimed long enough ago that discussion of it wasn’t all on the internet, and what I keep finding is discussion of the n-word, and it’s really not my place to pick links about that. However, here’s a couple links on reclamation in general:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/opinion/the-power-of-repurposing-a-slur.html
https://the-orbit.net/progpub/2018/05/24/reclaiming-slurs/
And re: “oriental” and its ties to Orientalism, I don’t think there’s a better voice about it than Edward Saïd: https://www.shmoop.com/edward-said/quotes.html
(Angry Syr’Nj face, weirdly appropriate for me jumping back into comments today. But not actually angry ftr, just kinda punched in the gut.)
They’re not asian though. They’re not from asia. Asia doesn’t exist.
Not to presume, but judging from context clues in the phrasing of that post, I’m pretty sure the hypothetical ethnicity references that were the start of this conversation – and not the comic characters they inspired – are the ones Shweta was discussing how to refer to here.
To expand on this: there may be no Japan or Asia in Arkerra, but there’s also no Orient (which just refers to the countries of Asia).
Therefore, Oriental wouldn’t be an appropriate descriptor either; it’s about as adequate a descriptor for how a person looks, as would be saying that they look like they’re from the Caucasus, Africa, or the Americas, just to name a few analogues.
When it comes to race, you really can’t go right with physical descriptors, even if all you’re trying to do is accurately portray a certain cosmetic standard from an artistic standpoint.
This is why, when accepting artistic instructions on which to base my art, I generally ask for photo references of people, skin tones, and specific physical features, rather than requesting written descriptions. It takes concepts of race out of the equation as thoroughly as possible.
Asia is only the Orient on Earth. Surely Arkerra has an east as well? Regardless of whether the people there share phenotypes with Miyamoto and Iwatani, as long as compasses work, there are one or more Orients of the world.
(Conversely, of course, to borrow your examples, the Caucasus, Africa, and the Americas are names of Earth places, and not just bearings/directions.)
In fairness, Arkerra having an “east” doesn’t imply who or what it’s populated with.
More to the point, you can not only use those terms in a geographic sense, but in a geopolitical and cultural sense – by talking, as I did, about the countries of those land masses, rather than merely the land masses themselves.
“The Orient”, and therefore “Oriental” as a term has both a current and a historical implication, that is specific to Earth, and therefore only makes sense in stories – fiction or nonfiction – grounded with direct, in-canon references to human history on Earth.
Oriental just means eastern. The east definitely exists on Arkherra.
The country they’re from might not actually be east of Gastonia, though. Actually I’m not sure if there are any other human countries besides Gastonia. But Gastonia seems to consist of such a small amount of land that it wouldn’t really have multiple skin colors…
There are no good answers.
All of that was the gist of my point (but replace skin color with literally any set of stereotypical physical features including that).
And Oriental, if you look it up, generally refers to the countries – as in, those societies organized under the governments of the region – and therefore only indirectly refers to the people living there, who are not, by any stretch of the imagination, all one ethnicity or culture.
Given that the term falls short of even meeting that standard, it’s definitely not useful for delineating a particular stereotype you want to evoke, unless it’s a specious, racist one.
Which makes it still not a highly respectful way to refer to a person, and therefore bad practice to use it.
Just everyone later remember that the cunning opportunist, apple of his father’s eye, Taro Iwatani willingly walked into a burlap sack.
Wasn’t there a plot point later that Taro was behind the whole thing? I could be misremembering that, but if there is then it’s not stupidity to play along in order to get the other kids to.
I love Frigg stuffing her face full of shrimp in the background.
Actually, earth doesn’t really have An East, for that matter.
North and south are absolute terms, determined by earth’s magnetic field, but east and west? That’s just relative to where you are.
It makes just as much sense, if not more, to say that San Francisco is east of Tokyo as it does to say that it’s west of it.
We just call Asia ‘the east’ and America ‘the west’ because we arbitrarily decided London is the centre of the world.
(the discworld’s equivalents, by the way, are hub wards and romwards, which are absolute, and turnwise widdershins, which are only relative)
I like the way Gravy doesn’t think he’s part of the team, merely an observer along for the ride.
He keeps himself apart in his head for a long time, so it makes sense, I think.
Hey T, thank you for sharing the notes for the world building in this story! Its especially interesting to see how the story evolved and I was curious about the challenges faced by authors as they build a story over the course of years. Could you explain the techniques the team used to maintain consistency, and what worked and didn’t?
Also am I correct in asserting that Pardo’s race changed later in the story?
Ex: http://guildedage.net/comic/chapter-38-page-9/
Thanks!
Pardo was intended to be white and remained so, though we don’t get a really great look at him in this chapter. However, Her Grace Iwatani’s race did change, at least from what we originally intended. It’s a little ambiguous to my eye here, but while John worked from these early pages, he made the Iwatanis more monochromatic.
We had thankfully few issues like this, and I’d say most of the reason why comes down to the fact that we didn’t get tired of re-reading our old work. To be honest, we had a lot of arguments in GA’s middle period, so keeping that old work in our memories was partly a way to one-up each other when things got tense between us. “Look, dufus, we CAN’T have that character do that here because on page 22 of this chapter, he SPECIFICALLY SAYS…” etc.
Over at Menage a 3 and related series, my willingness to traipse through the archives makes me the series’ unofficial continuity cop. Today’s installment includes a nickname I corrected slightly because either Dave or Gisele remembered it as hyphenated.
Hm… Gonna be That Guy, here, though hopefully with due respect and at least some notion of nuance.
“Oriental”, for folks resembling this world’s East Asians (Chinese, Pacific Rim) is… problematic, at best. It’s not an outright slur, obviously, but it’s got a bit of a negative history to it (not the least being that the term originally referred to what’s now the Middle East).
Of course, most of the other terms that might be chosen tend to have the same issue as “East Asian”–they’re based on geographic and historic features that don’t exist in Akarra (“Mongolian”, for instance). I suppose I’d just bite the bullet and default to ‘yellow’ or even ‘golden’, to contrast with white/black/brown. If there were a race consonant with the indigenous American tribes, I’d opt for ‘russet’, for what I think are obvious reasons.
I think the takeaway here is that there’s really NO value-neutral way to express this skin color that’s also both widely recognized and not tied to Terran place names, which probably says something about us right there. I still think “Oriental” might raise fewer eyebrows than “yellow” in the quasi-medieval context of Arkerra, but had you been sitting on my shoulder and whispering “golden” to me at the time, I might’ve gone with that one. It’s not widely known, but the meaning is easy to infer next to “white” and “black.”